Linked List: October 2009

Saturday, 31 October 2009

Bottom line: this video from my pal Albert McMurry — with contributions from dozens of kind folks around the web — is precisely the sort of concentrated awesomeness that just might make my dream come true. Thank you all. Don’t be lazy.

Joshua Topolsky likes it, especially the hardware. The software clearly isn’t as polished as the iPhone’s, but the year-over-year improvement from last year’s HTC G1 to next week’s Droid is pretty remarkable.

Friday, 30 October 2009

My thanks to The Soulmen for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Ulysses 2.0, their Mac OS X semantic text editor for writers. It uses a plain text syntax that borrows from LaTeX, Setext, and Markdown, separating content from presentation. It uses a project metaphor that lets you group all related documents, and their notes, together in a single window — think of it as an IDE for writers. It also has several options for full-screen editing, a big boon for concentrating. Check out their screencasts for a tour of Ulysses’s interface and features.

Ulysses has a generous 60-day fully-featured demo period, and DF readers can save 25 percent off the regular price with coupon code “DARING”, good through the end of November (which, not coincidentally, is National Novel Writing Month).

Steve Jobs said, “The reason I call [Apple TV] a hobby is, a lot
of people have tried and failed to make it a business. And it’s
a hard problem. So we’re trying. I think if we work on it and
improve things over the next year, 18 months, we can crack
that.”

That was 29 months ago. Apple still hasn’t cracked it. Apple TV
3.0 is a nice, mild update to an outdated piece of hardware
that’s still not nearly as capable as it should be.

I’m with Snell. The good news is that the 3.0 software is a nice update for the existing hardware. The bad news is, the hardware is outdated, and isn’t really capable of the sort of killer features people are really hoping for in Apple TV.

Thursday, 29 October 2009

New UI and adds support for the iTunes Extras (movies) and iTunes LP (music) formats. Screenshots of the new UI are here. Looks good to me — especially how they’ve moved “My Movies”, “My TV Shows”, etc. to the top of the menu lists. (And they’ve switched the system font from Lucida Grande to Helvetica.)

The easy single-handed operation of the iPhone is not one of its
obvious selling points but is one of those little features that
grows on you and becomes nearly indispensable. A portable
networked computing and gaming device that can be easily operated
with one hand can be used in a surprising variety of situations.

Splendid feature in Wired by Amy Wallace on the movement to skip childhood vaccinations:

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new
phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri
Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science
flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is,
and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades
later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion:
Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to
offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems
address real human needs that are not being met by our society,”
Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation,
channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied
medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the
rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly.
Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to
avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make
perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten
back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the
irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let
down our guard.

Somehow I missed this vintage 25-year claim chowder collection from Philip Elmer-DeWitt back in January. Here’s John C. Dvorak’s take on the Mac:

The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood
by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple
makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you
want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the
equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses
an experimental pointing device called a “mouse”. There is no
evidence that people want to use these things. I don’t want one of
these new fangled devices.

“The bottom line is we’re a pretty inexperienced team, and for
many of these young players, this will be the first time they’ve
been to the World Series in a year.” Manuel said. “A lot has
changed in that time. If you would have told me last October that
this country would elect a black president before the Philadelphia
Phillies made it back to the World Series, I would have laughed in
your face.”

While Philadelphia players admitted the 11-month championship-
winless streak has been difficult for them personally, most agreed
that it’s the fans who’ve suffered most, enduring more than
500,000 minutes without a World Series victory.

What I found was very surprising. TouchJSON actually beat
plists. It was slightly faster in every test I ran. This is
awesome because plists have a much larger file size. They are
usually about twice as big as JSON files due to all of the
extra markup.

Update 1: A bit of chirping on Twitter complaining that Soffes should have used the binary plist format, rather than XML. But how do you create binary plist data from web apps written in Ruby, Python, PHP or whatever, if they aren’t running on Mac OS X? I don’t think the binary plist format is documented by Apple.

Good piece by Saul Hansell in the NYT on Motorola’s effort to build itself around Android smartphones, and the leadership of co-CEO Sanjay Jha. But just to note how different a position they’re in from Apple, note this bit on early prototypes of the Droid:

Verizon worried that the angular design of what was to be the
Droid appealed much more to men than women. Motorola quickly
rounded some of the phone’s edges and added a rubberized backing
to create a softer feeling.

Can you imagine Apple taking industrial design feedback from a carrier?

Wednesday, 28 October 2009

Apple already offers similar GPS capabilities on its iPhone 3GS
maps applications, which leverages Google Maps data. However,
Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google, said
Google is working to build a version of Google Maps Navigation
for the iPhone.

Interesting idea, but it’s a shame it’s a separate device from the regular email/SMS Peek. Integrated Twitter support would fit right in with a dedicated “messaging” device. (But I can’t imagine using Twitter without having a way to follow links to web pages.)

Video includes a side-by-side browser speed test with an iPhone 3GS; the 3GS wins, but not by much. Interestingly, browser scrolling in Android 2.0 seems to have far less “friction” than the iPhone — flick the page and it seems to scroll until you stop it.

Vista will be the last version of Windows that exists in its
current, monolithic form, according to Gartner. Instead, the
research firm predicts, Microsoft will be forced to migrate
Windows to a modular architecture tied together through
hardware-supported virtualisation.

The next version of the iPhone is already well underway and it
will have cooler features than the existing models. Apple created
a platform, not just a piece of hardware that uses the same old
software. That’s a huge distinction.

If you want a parallel, try this. Apple had the most successful
music player on the market with the iPod mini. Any other company
executive would have given their right arm to have that device.
What did Apple do? It dumped it. Apple stopped making its top-selling
iPod and introduced the iPod nano in its place. Just when
the competitors thought they had Apple in their sights, Apple
completely changed the game.

Right. You know who thinks the iPhone 3GS stinks? Steve Jobs. No one is working harder on an “iPhone 3GS killer” than Apple.

Ben Charny, reporting for the WSJ on the aftermath of Google’s announcement of maps navigation in Android 2.0:

The move sent shares of the top two navigation device makers
reeling. Shares of Garmin fell 17.2% to $31.88 on very heavy
trading, foiling any lift shares would have seen from an upgrade
Wednesday from Goldman Sachs, which raised its Garmin rating to
sell from conviction sell.

A Garmin spokesman wasn’t immediately available for comment.

Meanwhile, TomTom N.V. shares fell more than 20% to €8.11, a new
52-week low. The company also warned Wednesday that selling prices
were 9% lower than it had forecast.

A TomTom spokesman was unavailable for comment.

I’ve gotten a bunch of emails from readers objecting to my earlier comment that the end is near for dedicated GPS devices. The biggest objection is that the dedicated devices store all the map data locally. That’s great, and I’m sure it’s essential for some people. But the writing is on the wall. Google is entering the field. Their service is going to be free. It is going to improve constantly. Surely, eventually, map data will be stored (or at least cached) locally on devices. Soon enough, Google’s service will be both free and superior. Garmin and TomTom are toast.

Wait a minute, Chrome OS ships with the Gnome desktop environment, OpenOffice, and GIMP? I thought the whole point was that it was purely web-based?

Update: Ah-ha, it’s a fake. Just some scammers hosting on Google Sites. No wonder I was confused. My apologies for the false alarm. I can’t imagine that Google is OK with this, but apparently this site has been here for two weeks.

People visiting Microsoft’s new store in Scottsdale, Ariz., have
started noticing something interesting, apart from its shameless
similarities to Apple’s retail outlets. The computers on display
in the Microsoft Store come without any run-of-the-mill “crapware”
— the derisive term used for generic trial software and other
unwanted programs that commonly clog new PCs when they’re shipped
by computer makers.

Example code from Ben Artin of Fetch Softworks showing how to add a “usro” resource to a file for the “case when you need to make sure that a particular file will open with a particular app when the user double-clicks it in the Finder”. Note that “usro” resources are undocumented by Apple and subject to change at any time, but there’s no other way to get this behavior in Snow Leopard.

Tons of new features and improvements in the imminent new version of Android. The web browser appears to have caught up to MobileSafari in several ways, including HTML5 database and geolocation support, and double-tap to zoom. The email client adds support for Exchange and, moving ahead of the iPhone’s MobileMail, adds support for a combined “all accounts” inbox view.
Check out the official video for a tour of the new features.

Chuck Rose, the owner of the Pine Restaurant and Sports Bar near
Citi Field, said he was so disheartened that he could not even
choose between the Phillies and the Yankees. “I hope it rains
for 40 days and 40 nights,” he said, adding that he might
dedicate one television in the bar to a replaying of the 1986
World Series, when the Mets last won the championship.

Turns out Seth MacFarlane isn’t PC enough to be a PC. Microsoft
was set to sponsor a prime time special by the “Family Guy”
creator as part of its Windows 7 media blitz, but was somehow
surprised when the typically MacFarlane-esque fare didn’t exactly
“fit with the Windows brand.”

Did they sign up to sponsor MacFarlane’s special without any familiarity with his work? I thought it was a good match, in that MacFarlane serially rips off The Simpsons, and Microsoft serially rips off Apple.

Following up on his aforelinked story in the NYT today, Saul Hansell makes the case that Google’s rival for Android is not the iPhone, but specifically Windows Mobile:

“If you asked me to go to a venture capitalist and pitch the
Android business model, I don’t think I could,” said Robert J.
Bach, the president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices
division, at a meeting with reporters earlier this month. […]

“If you get Android, you get an operating system that is a
version of Linux and a few tools,” Mr. Bach said. “That’s
fine. But what are you going to do as your music experience? What
will you do for your photos experience?”

So when everyone thinks about great mobile music and photo experiences, they think of Windows Mobile? This is another one of those quotes from a Microsoft executive where it’s scary to consider that maybe Bach actually believes what he’s saying.

Microsoft’s angle is that because Android is freely available to handset makers, that Google has no business model for Android. But they do: search advertising. (Another case where I wonder whether Microsoft says this because they think people are stupid and will believe whatever Microsoft says, or, worse, if their executives actually believe this.) What Google wants are lots of mobile search queries. The one angle Hansell misses, which further makes the point that Android is not targeted against the iPhone, is that the iPhone generates a ton of mobile search queries for Google. Apple may see Android as a competitor, but Google loves the iPhone.

Cellphone makers that have used Windows Mobile to run their top-of-the-
line smartphones — including Samsung, LG, Kyocera, Sony Ericsson
— are now also making Android devices. Twelve Android handsets
have been announced this year, with dozens more expected next
year. Motorola has dropped Windows Mobile from its line entirely
in a switch to Android. HTC, a major cellphone maker, expects half
its phones sold this year to run Android. Dell is using Android
for its entry into the cellphone market.

Indeed, a J. D. Power & Associates survey found that Windows
Mobile had the lowest satisfaction rating among customers of any
smartphone operating system. The iPhone has by far the most
satisfying software, the study found. Android is a distant second,
followed closely by BlackBerry’s operating system. Windows
Mobile scored below average on every attribute, said Kirk Parsons,
director of the study, especially in ease of operation, speed and
stability.

I love that “especially”. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

I’m sure Apple’s executives will take these survey results very seriously, given that they come from the same company that, just a few weeks ago, predicted doom and gloom for Apple’s back-to-school laptop sales because the kids all want “netbooks”.

I hear next week’s Retrevo survey will show that people in hell want ice water.

How much of your personal information is Google willing to turn
over to a third party without a fight? We’ve asked a California
federal court to unseal a report that would give customers of the
world’s largest Internet company an answer to that question.
[…] A Gmail user who did nothing wrong had his or her account
shut down because of the bank’s monumental screw up. And Google,
a company that basically prints its own cash, didn’t lift a
finger to protect the rights of one of its users.

Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and
that explains most of the surprises. It explains why people are
surprised how carefully you have to choose cofounders and how hard
you have to work to maintain your relationship. You don’t have to
do that with coworkers. It explains why the ups and downs are
surprisingly extreme. In a job there is much more damping. But it
also explains why the good times are surprisingly good: most
people can’t imagine such freedom. As you go down the list, almost
all the surprises are surprising in how much a startup differs
from a job.

However, AT&T added customers at a faster pace in the third quarter on the strength of the iPhone. Verizon is hoping to change that equation via a partnership with Google. John Killian, CFO of Verizon, characterized the company’s wireless performance as strong and said there “are plenty of revenue growth opportunities” ahead. It’s clear Verizon is betting big on Android.

I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how important the iPhone is to AT&T.

Beginning Wednesday, the Yankees will try to win their first
championship since 2000 when they take on the defending champion
Philadelphia Phillies.

At a number of levels, this will be a fascinating confrontation.
You get the sense that Philadelphia — the fans, not the team —
has been looking forward to taking on a glamour franchise that
routinely fields the best team that money can buy. New Yorkers and
Philadelphians regularly commute to, and hang out, in each
other’s backyard.

It’s an epic matchup. The last NL team to win back-to-back championships was the 75-76 Cincinnati Reds. So either the Phillies become back-to-back champs by beating the Yankees, the most storied franchise in the sport and the team with the best record this season, or, the Yankees return to form and win their first championship in nine years, doing so against the returning champs.

Friday, 23 October 2009

My thanks to Edovia for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote TouchPad, their excellent remote control track pad/keyboard for iPhones and iPod Touches. Just turn on screen sharing on your Mac (in the Sharing panel of System Prefs), and you’re ready to go. For mouse control, TouchPad works just like a track pad, and its keyboard includes Mac-specific keys like Control, Option, Command, Tab, and Escape.

It also has a dedicated remote control mode for use with Front Row. If you have a Mac Mini hooked up to your TV, you’re nuts if you don’t have TouchPad.

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and
repository will also be removed shortly.

The writing’s been on the wall for this ever since 10.6 shipped with less support for ZFS than 10.5. There was unofficial “kinda sorta works” support for ZFS in 10.5, but none in 10.6.

Word on the street in Cupertino is that dropping ZFS wasn’t an engineering decision, but a legal one, and it might have had something to do with Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. I don’t know if it was a problem with the terms of the CDDL license, general distrust/dislike for Oracle, or what — only that the word came down from legal that ZFS was a no-go. Update: Perhaps it was the NetApp patent lawsuit against ZFS.

The flip side is that I’ve heard that Apple’s file systems team is full steam ahead on their own next-generation file system. And, perhaps not coincidentally, they’re hiring.

Their big news this week was a couple of PCs, a new keyboard and a
multi-touch mouse. This last will likely go down in history as one
of the lamest devices yet as they should know, given the iPhone,
that touch is connected to the screen and not anything else. They
likely would have done better putting fir [sic] on the damn thing and
building it to fart the star spangled banner at least that would
have been patriotic.

I’m coming around to the idea that Enderle’s really a genius and his doofus routine is a Stephen Colbert-esque schtick.

Apple’s pushing the “if you have to go through a major migration to upgrade, why not just upgrade to a Mac?” angle. If you stop and think about it, it’s really rather odd for a company to be adding to the hype surrounding a major product launch from a competitor. But this is exactly what I was getting at last week when I wrote that Windows 7 might be good for both Microsoft and Apple.

The specific case of “user myopia” in the aforelinked piece from Jeff Atwood was related to Markdown formatting for submissions to Super User. Markdown’s popularity — still growing — is incredibly gratifying. But I never intended for it to be used by people who don’t actually know the Markdown formatting rules. I created Markdown for my own use, and, well, I know the formatting rules pretty well.

For use in situations like user-submitted comments, GitHub Flavored Markdown is a superior variant. It changes just three rules from regular Markdown, all of which make for a better set of formatting rules for people who don’t even know the rules.

That’s a good rule of thumb to keep in mind. It’s not that you shouldn’t bother using words, or that you shouldn’t sweat the details on your UI copywriting, but simply that you should keep in mind that many users won’t read a damn one of them.

It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s worth noting that in iPhone OS, they’re called settings, whereas in Mac OS, they’ve always been preferences. Settings are often unavoidable — things like usernames and passwords for online services must be adjustable.

Nokia still sells way more phones than Apple does, even counting only “smartphones”, but the iPhone sells for a far, far higher average selling price than Nokia’s phones. In terms of profit from handset sales, Apple is either already ahead of Nokia or soon will be.

In the third quarter, the company added 2 million new wireless
subscribers to reach a total of 81.6 million. Further, some 4.3
million 3G-integrated devices were added to the AT&T network, of
which the iPhone accounted for 3.2 million activations.

Three out of every four new 3G devices added to AT&T’s network for the quarter were iPhones.

From the bottom of an AP story about today’s big release of Windows 7:

“Let’s face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet
is not designed for the iPhone,” Ballmer said. “That’s why they’ve
got 75,000 applications — they’re all trying to make the Internet
look decent on the iPhone.”

Of course Ballmer’s going to downplay the iPhone’s success, just like how Apple COO Tim Cook downplays the release of Windows 7 earlier in the story. But this just doesn’t even make sense. The iPhone’s success is really getting to him.

Our industry has collectively taught average people over the last
few decades that computers should be feared and are always a
single misstep from breaking. We’ve trained them to expect the
working state to be fragile and temporary, and experience from
previous upgrades has convinced them that they shouldn’t mess
with anything if it works.

19 years and, as of this week, 1,000 issues ago. Here’s Adam Engst’s announcement of issue #1 from comp.sys.mac. “A hard disk is recommended, but not necessary since each
week’s issue of TidBITS will never be more than 40K.”

Their Flick Fishing app is behind their Top Gun app in the regular sales list, but their relative positions are flipped in the top-grossing list, which indicates that the top-grossing list takes in-app purchasing sales into account. This, in turn, means that free apps which offer in-app purchasing will be eligible for the top-grossing list.

(We’re left to suss this out for ourselves because Apple does not state how the top-grossing apps list is compiled.)

You know, if Verizon is going to pour millions of dollars into rolling out their iPhone-killing “Droid” handset, they could have at least hired an ad agency who knows how and when to use proper apostrophes and primes, and who doesn’t mix them multiple times in the same television ad.

It’s not just that the iPhone has fancy woo-woo transitions and
purty graphics; it runs all the way down the software stack. For
example, when I tap on something, I don’t have to hover for five
seconds wondering “now did it get that tap, or do I have to do
it again?” This is something other platforms are still
struggling with. When we say you have a bad experience, this is
the sort of thing we mean. It has little to do with features, and
everything to do with core functionality.

What matters is how things work in actual use, not how they’re supposed to work.

Syncing bugs and performance problems led him to abandon the Palm Pre:

If the Calendar app is not running, it takes 10-15 seconds to get
from “I clicked on the Calendar icon” to “I can see today’s
events”. And then, switching from the display of one day to the
next takes 2+ seconds (and it doesn’t buffer swipes, so you have
to keep trying).

And:

It seems to me that the only way this phone is going to be usable
is for it to get literally 10× faster across the board. There was
a speed improvement of maybe 10% between WebOS 1.0 and 1.2.1, so I
think it’s safe to assume that they’ve already picked the low-hanging
fruit. I don’t expect the performance of this phone to be
even remotely suitable for every day use for at least a year.

It’s worth recalling that Apple had a similar idea to WebOS for the iPhone, where certain apps would run as Dashboard-style widgets, written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Apple abandoned the idea in the six months between the iPhone’s January 2007 announcement and when it went on sale at the end of June, concluding that performance for such apps was unacceptable and that they should go native Cocoa across the board. And Apple was only going to do it for small apps, like Weather, Stocks, and Calculator, not the flagship apps like Calendar and Mail.

Good name and much nicer looking hardware than the Kindle, with a color touchscreen underneath the e-paper display instead of the Kindle’s clunky looking keyboard. Their tech specs comparison is explicitly aimed against the Kindle. Supports Wi-Fi, too — which is good, because the Nook’s 3G is provided by AT&T.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports on the estimates from the leading Apple financial analysts. Andy Zaky and “Deagol” were pretty close, but were still low. (Deagol has a nice post-mortem here.)

I’m not surprised that so many of the analysts were way off overall. I’m only surprised that so many of them were so far off on estimates for iPhones sold. The two 3GS models are selling like hotcakes, and it’s not hard to find people at Apple who’ll tell you that.

But Oppenheimer repeatedly said that the company planned to deliver “greater value to consumers” in the quarters ahead. He cited lower ASPs (average selling prices) as a reason why those record gross margins will come down from 34% to more like 30% in the current quarter. And COO Tim Cook talked about “closing the umbrella,” so that rivals with lesser products couldn’t steal business simply by offering lower pricetags.

Intriguing, to say the least. I can’t see them reducing iPhone or iPod prices now, so it must be about Macs. But we’ve seen Apple pessimistically forecast lower margins before, too — they like to set expectations low.

The Company posted revenue of $9.87 billion and a net quarterly
profit of $1.67 billion, or $1.82 per diluted share. These results
compare to revenue of $7.9 billion and net quarterly profit of
$1.14 billion, or $1.26 per diluted share, in the year-ago
quarter. […]

Apple sold 3.05 million Macintosh computers during the quarter,
representing a 17 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter.
The Company sold 10.2 million iPods during the quarter,
representing an eight percent unit decline from the year-ago
quarter. Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones in the quarter,
representing seven percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.

More Macs and more iPhones than in any previous quarter in history. In a worldwide recession. With the holiday quarter still to come. Yowza.

Update: Check out those after-hours numbers on the stock price: up 7 percent as I type this.

Nice Fake Steve piece by Dan Lyons, simultaneously providing spot-on business analysis of Microsoft’s slide into technical irrelevance and media analysis of this profile by Ashlee Vance from yesterday’s Sunday New York Times, which (the NYT profile) was remarkably negative. Be sure also to read his follow-up on the Times’s “objectivity” straitjacket.

Earlier today when I interviewed Mozilla CEO John Lilly onstage at
the Play conference, an annual confab organized by the students of
the Haas School of Business at the University of Berkeley, he
hinted that the company was going to launch a brand new
application for the iPhone, though he declined to reveal any
details. “Mozilla will release an app to the iPhone App Store in
the next few weeks,” Lilly said. “It’ll surprise people.”

Malik guesses that it has something to do with Weave, Mozilla’s still-in-progress sync service. That’d be my guess as well. But I strongly doubt that they’re working on a mobile web browser, as Kevin C. Tofel guesses here. Tofel points to the fact that Apple has approved numerous third-party web browser apps, but what he overlooks is that all of those apps are using the iPhone’s system-standard WebKit framework for rendering and JavaScript. And none of those browsers run in the background, like MobileSafari does. If Mozilla is working on an iPhone browser of some sort using the system WebKit framework, no problem. And I suppose it’s possible they’re working on an iPhone port of their Fennec mobile rendering engine — but I’d be flabbergasted if Apple were to approve that.

There are third-party web browser apps in the App Store, but there are no third-party HTML rendering engines or JavaScript interpreters.

Wolfram has released a native iPhone app for their Wolfram Alpha “computational knowledge engine”. It looks good, but what’s getting the most attention is the price: $50. MG Siegler says it should be $5 or $10. Rafe Needleman says it’s overpriced.

I haven’t bought it, but I’m glad they’ve set the price high. There’s widespread consensus that the current race-to-the-bottom in App Store pricing discourages the development of deep, significant applications. If all anyone is buying are quick-hit apps, then all anyone will make are quick-hit apps. We can’t have it both ways, folks. By pricing the app at $50, Wolfram is clearly saying, “This app is significant.”

It’ll be interesting to see how they do on the top-grossing list. Maybe it won’t work, but I’m glad to see someone try.

There are 3 carriers (NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank & Au by KDDI) who’ve
all created their own set of emoji glyphs in differing areas of the
private-use range Unicode character space. Basic emoji supports
176 glyphs plus an additional 76 for C-HTML 4.0 for a total of
252. The iPhone — which uses the SoftBank implementation —
supports 471 emoji glyphs and to top it off, Apple and Google
have been working on a standards proposal for inclusion in
ISO/IEC 10646 which proposes 722 glyphs in total. Confused yet?
Right then.

With millions of mobile phones supporting emoji & Internet
connections, web developers want to take advantage of the extended
glyphs in the data they send to mobile devices but in the Ruby
community there doesn’t seem to be a clear library that
implements all 4 standards. Hence Emoji for Ruby.

Saturday, 17 October 2009

The animation is pretty close to the commercial they showed during tonight’s Yankees-Angels game, which (I’ve heard) will be in heavy rotation during football games tomorrow.

Those “iDon't”s, with the straight primes instead of proper apostrophes, make the commercial look slapdash.

Seems pretty clear that Verizon isn’t getting the iPhone any time soon.

The small print notes that “Droid” is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd., licensed to Verizon.

It’ll be running Android 2.0.

Lastly, the big point: “Droid” is going to be a Verizon-owned brand. It’s purportedly a Motorola-manufactured phone, but Verizon is the licensee of the “Droid” trademark. (Which name, by the way, strikes me as the perfect name for an Android OS phone — sort of implicitly establishes it as the Android phone.) That’s the big thing. Verizon doesn’t see itself as a mere carrier for other companies’ phones. It sees itself as being bigger than the phones. It’s Verizon-vs.-Apple in this spot, not Verizon-vs.-AT&T.

Update: It certainly could be that RIM knows the Storm 2 is a clunker, and they suspected that Gizmodo’s reviewers would flatly say so, and so they didn’t send a review unit simply to avoid a sure-fire bad review. Product reviews are without question the best part of Gizmodo (and Engadget). But that’s not how Lam’s diatribe reads. Lam feels insulted, but rather than say so, he says instead that RIM has insulted Gizmodo’s readers, which I find humorous in that Lam is the guy who has so much respect for Gizmodo readers that, for instance, when he found out that Cisco was going to announce some sort of slapdash “iPhone” VOIP dingus in December 2006 in an effort to protect their iPhone trademark, Lam let them (i.e. trusting Gizmodo readers) believe for an entire weekend that Apple was announcing the iPhone that coming Monday — a stunt that converted trust into extra page views.

My thanks to Pzizz Relax for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Pzizz Relax is a $3 iPhone app designed to help you relax for refreshing afternoon “power naps”, with music, sound, and positive affirmations. Adjustable nap durations and unique soundtracks each time you use it. The UI is obvious and convenient.

Mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson said Friday its losses
widened to €164 million ($245 million) on sagging sales in
the third quarter, and announced new financing from external
investors. […]

Sony Ericsson said it had strengthened its balance sheet by
securing €455 million ($676 million) in external financing
facilities, primarily from parent companies Sony and Ericsson.

Two thoughts: (a) This is what happens to a phone maker today that isn’t building on a solid software platform — even one like Sony Ericsson, which has always made delightful hardware; and (b) Sony Ericsson’s “external investors” are Sony and Ericsson?

You may recall a few months ago I posted a slew of links related to the new <video> tag in HTML5. My obsession was fueled by two things: (a) that adding built-in official support for video in HTML5 was a great idea, one of the very best new things in the spec; and (b) that, due to the convoluted situation surrounding audio and video codecs, it was utterly unclear how exactly one should or even could use it, even if only targeting Firefox and WebKit-based browsers.

I had the idea that I should figure it all out and document it. I gave up. Luckily for all of us, Mark Pilgrim did not, and his new chapter on video for his in-progress Dive Into HTML5 is comprehensive — and as usual, written with clarity and style. This is a must-bookmark reference for anyone who makes web sites.

In App Purchase is being rapidly adopted by developers in their
paid apps. Now you can use In App Purchase in your free apps to
sell content, subscriptions, and digital services.

You can also simplify your development by creating a single
version of your app that uses In App Purchase to unlock additional
functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of
your app. Using In App Purchase in your app can also help combat
some of the problems of software piracy by allowing you to verify
In App Purchases.

This is a major policy change. Prior to today, free apps were not allowed to use in-app purchasing. As of 10 minutes ago, developers can now make “lite” apps that are free which let you pay to upgrade to a full version from within the app itself.

The App Store has been hard to predict so far, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that this is going to be a very big deal. I think soon, many (most?) apps will be free in “lite” form, with an in-app upgrade option to a full version.

It seems mostly under-publicized and under-utilized, but Apple fully supports a way to publish iPhone apps that doesn’t involve the App Store at all: optimized-for-the-iPhone web apps. You can get an icon on the home screen, operate off-line, store data locally, and more. For anyone who wants to use JavaScript and other web technologies to develop for the iPhone, this is in many ways a better route than the upcoming Flash CS5 compiler.

Jonathan Stark is writing a book for O’Reilly on iPhone web apps, and the contents (currently in “beta”) are available for free on the web.

Nokia Oyj, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, had its
first net loss since the company began reporting quarterly in
1996, hurt by costs related to a joint venture with Siemens AG and
weaker demand.

The net loss totaled 559 million euros ($834 million), after a
profit of 1.09 billion euros a year earlier. Sales declined 20
percent to 9.8 billion euros, missing the average estimate of
10.03 billion euros in a Bloomberg analyst survey. Analysts had
anticipated a profit of 367 million euros.

On Thursday morning, Amazon.com took another step in its effort to
bring instant gratification to its customers, introducing a new
“Local Express Delivery Option.” If an eligible item is
ordered between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. (depending on the city) Amazon
will have it delivered on the same day. To start out, the e-
commerce giant is rolling out the service in seven cities — New
York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Las Vegas and
Seattle. (With Chicago, Indianapolis and Phoenix to come soon).

A new Windows text editor with clever original features and a graceful UI. Never thought I’d write those words. I’m particularly intrigued by the “minimap” — a zoomed-out view of the entire file. (Via Alex Payne.)

On the other hand, reviewing the Cliq for Engadget, Chris Ziegler doesn’t like the on-screen keyboard:

The screen can only be characterized as the strangest capacitive
screen we’ve ever used, because it feels… well, resistive. We
found it usable but perhaps the balkiest of any Android phone to
date, giving the user plenty of motivation to slide open the
keyboard rather than trying to deal with the virtual one. Although
it’s nothing more than a reskinned version of the default Cupcake
keyboard, it was basically impossible to use without injecting
enough mistakes to make it more trouble than it was worth — a
problem we haven’t had (at least not to this extent) on the
myTouch.

Two notes. One, I’d imagine neither BlackBerry nor Motorola is feeling good about the fact that their phones had to share a single review with each other, a clear indication that Mossberg considers both to be also-rans. Two is this bit on typing on the Cliq:

My biggest gripe was with the physical keyboard, which I found
cramped and hard to use. The top row is too close to the bottom of
the screen and, on the bottom row, I kept hitting the symbols key
when I was aiming for “M” or “N.” So I found myself
constantly resorting to the virtual on-screen keyboard, which
worked pretty well.

So for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard, here we are two years later and Walt Mossberg is pretty much saying that the Cliq’s hardware keyboard is a waste of space.

Roz Ho, vice president for Microsoft’s division in charge of the Sidekick:

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all,
customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected
by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal
data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after
we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then
continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected
users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high
scores, as quickly as possible.

Great news. Perhaps their statements last week, that the data was “almost certainly” lost for good, were along the lines of under-promising and over-delivering.

We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure
that created data loss in the core database and the back-up.

Well, that certainly explains it.

Wednesday, 14 October 2009

Technology firms also face a similar problem. In technology, as in
most businesses, the way to make it to the top is through sales,
so you end up with a situation where the CEO is a sales guy who
has no understanding of technology and, for example, thinks that
you can cut the development time of a project in half by adding
twice as many people. I have seen this have catastrophic results.

That’s precisely what I meant about Trillin’s piece’s applicability to the difference between the old Microsoft under Gates (programmer), and the new Microsoft under Ballmer (sales guy). Ballmer is running a company whose products he doesn’t really understand.

The same thing happened seven years ago with the live-typing
feature that I implemented in iChat 1.0 (which was only supported
for Bonjour chats.) I thought it was an awesome idea, and I’d
wanted to have it in a chat program since about 1997. But it
turned out that, in actual use, people hated it, for exactly the
reasons Manjoo describes: it makes you self-conscious. We took it
out in the next release.

I never mind instant updating when I use SubEthaEdit to collaboratively edit a text file, but I can’t think of a good reason Google Wave uses it other than the demo factor.

Mr. Jobs provided access to proprietary information about the
development and operation of Apple’s highly successful stores,
and Disney executives visited Apple’s research operation in
Cupertino, Calif. Mr. Jobs, who declined to comment, also insisted
that Disney build a prototype store to work out kinks, a costly
endeavor that most retailers skip.

The company followed his advice, working for the last year on a
full-scale, fully stocked store inside an unmarked warehouse in
Glendale, Calif. The prototype was crucial to shaping an overall
philosophy, Mr. Fielding said, noting that he discovered the shops
needed more “Pixar-esque winks and nods.”

Apple has taken an unusual step in its efforts to stop groups from
hacking its iPhone hardware — it changed the iPhone 3GS in mid-
production.

The news of the modified iPhone 3GS BootROM was first reported on
iClarified on Tuesday. The report noted that the new iPhone is no
longer vulnerable to the so-called “24kpwn” exploit. As
AppleInsider notes, it’s this exploit that hackers have used to
jailbreak the iPhone. With the most recent update, they will have
to find another way to hack the device.

The title of Dalrymple’s story is “Apple Ships Modified iPhone 3GS to Stop Hacking”. It wouldn’t seem unusual at all if the title were “Apple Fixes Exploitable Bug in Boot ROM”. The bugs exploited by jailbreakers aren’t sacred. They’re bugs.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth that you hear among Republicans is 68 percent envy and 32 percent sour grapes. Here is an idealistic, articulate young president who is enormously popular everywhere in the world except in the states of the Confederacy, and here sit the 28 percent of the American people who still thought Mr. Bush was doing a heckuva job at the end, gnashing their teeth, hoping and praying for something horrible to happen such as an infestation of locusts or the disappearance of the sun, something to make the president look bad, which is not a good place for a political party to be, hoping for the country to slide into chaos. When you bet against America, you are choosing long odds.

The bug sounds minor, but it is really very important because Apple events are crucial to so much of what goes on under the hood in Mac OS X, and in any case it has caused everyone’s scripts to break (whether written in AppleScript, rb-appscript, or anything else that sends Apple events). The underlying Apple event manager assigns a new return ID to every Apple event, and so sooner or later some Apple event is going to hit the magic FFFF value, and whatever sent that Apple event is going to error out, apparently randomly. You may even have seen such random errors on your machine without knowing it.

I wasn’t even aware that recent vintage iPhones and iPod Touches had FM-tuning hardware.

(Sidenote 1: Why do so many of the sites reporting on this, including Weintraub at 9 to 5 Mac, decorate their article with a mock-up showing the iPod Nano’s FM tuner photoshopped onto an iPhone? See: Engadget, The iPhone Blog. There aren’t even any small-print disclaimers describing these mock-ups as artist’s renditions or whatever. Surely most casual readers of these sites are left with the impression that these are leaked screenshots of the actual app.)

(Sidenote 2: This scoop belongs to Weintraub. But yet TUAW gives credit to Engadget first, and Weintraub’s report at 9 to 5 Mac second. Crummy. Update: TUAW has changed the links in the post to make at least slightly more clear that 9 to 5 Mac is the original source for the story.)

The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web. I’m going to tell you about the problems, and then tell you the one true way to generate traffic on the web, based on my own 14 years of hits and misses.

For the past month, some Mac OS X users have been reporting their
personal data missing after logging into their guest accounts, and
Apple now says it’s working on finding a fix.

“We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare
cases, and we are working on a fix,” an Apple representative said
in a prepared statement Monday.

What happens, according to numerous reports, is that after logging in and out of a Guest account (which, upon logout, wipes out any data stored within the Guest account’s home folder), and then logging in to a regular account, people are finding that their regular account has been wiped too.

Seems to be at least somewhat rare, and definitely doesn’t occur in all cases. I’ve tried it here and can’t reproduce it. Needless to say, though, I’d disable Guest account access until Apple releases a fix.

Monday, 12 October 2009

An investigative series I’ve been writing about organized cyber crime gangs stealing millions of dollars from small to mid-sized businesses has generated more than a few responses from business owners who were concerned about how best to protect themselves from this type of fraud.

The important takeaway for web developers in all of this is that WebKit is winning and that that is a good thing. The dynamics of the marketplace have thus far ensured that we don’t get “stuck” the way we did on the desktop. That is real progress.

Tog has run out of space for his iPhone apps, so he’s made a concept design for an upgraded version of Springboard that could handle more apps and offer a greater amount of organization.

I don’t agree with his proposed design (way too fiddly and fussy), but as always with Tog, it’s an interesting read and a thoughtful proposal. And he’s addressing a genuine problem — even with the nice improvements in iPhone OS 3 and iTunes 9, dealing with dozens still seems ungraceful, to say the least.

Saturday, 10 October 2009

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device — such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos — that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low.

Ben Zimmer on William Safire in his role as the NYT’s “On Language” columnist:

For more than 30 years, in more than 1,300 crisp installments, Safire used this space to create a singular voice, that of the “Language Maven,” as he styled himself. We lost that voice last month, but we are left with a rich and varied legacy that shaped how Americans talk about talk.

When Safire died and I wrote that he was one of my favorite writers and columnists, I got a slew of complaints from left-leaning DF readers. How could I say such good things about a man who, among other things, so strongly supported George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq?

Here’s the thing. I didn’t read his op-ed column because I agreed with him; I read it because I didn’t agree with him. Though I seldom agreed with his politics (and when I did, it was in favor of individual privacy and liberty), Safire was always thoughtful and his writing always playful. I feel it’s important to read the opinions of those with whom you tend to disagree, politically or otherwise.

But even if your politics and constitution are such that you could not abide his op-ed column, I don’t see how anyone who loves U.S. English didn’t cherish his Sunday “On Language” column as the national treasure that it was. 30 years! And he kicked ass until the very end.

My thanks to EA Mobile for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote FIFA 10, their new game for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Look no further than EA to see just how seriously the big game developers are taking the iPhone OS as a gaming platform. FIFA 10 features great gameplay, 3D graphics, 30 real leagues, 570 real teams, and 12,620 real players from around the world. Available now in the App Store for just $10.

After using pre-release versions of Windows 7 for nine months, and intensively testing the final version for the past month on many different machines, I believe it is the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced.

But, as Philip Elmer-DeWitt observes, Mossberg liked Vista too, when it debuted, including calling it “the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced.”

There’s no question 7 is better than Vista. The question is whether 7 is going to get the majority that’s still on XP to upgrade. My guess is that it will, but I wouldn’t bet too much on it.

Thursday, 8 October 2009

Louis Gerbarg, after inspecting the contents of the IPA file from an iPhone app produced with Flash CS5:

Technically speaking, these do appear to basically be within
letter of the SDK agreement, modulo the fact that Adobe appears
to making private API calls. They should be able to do what they
need to without making those calls, so ultimately that should be
a non-issue.

Now, the notion that what this thing emits is indistinguishable
from something Xcode emits is laughable. They are very different,
and not in a good way. While the apps may get acceptable frame
rates on an iPhone 3GS, they don’t on earlier hardware, and they
almost certainly uses substantially more power battery than
native games.

Update: It’s definitely worth noting that the survey results were not for all U.S. teens, but rather were the results of a survey of “middle-class and upper middle-class teens… representing the top 30% of U.S. households.”

GPS-maker Garmin’s first entry in the phone market, originally announced almost two years ago and much-delayed, is finally out. Looks interesting but expensive, with nickel-and-dime monthly costs and, according to Pogue, a crummy touchscreen.

Those of you dreaming about the end of AT&T’s exclusivity in the U.S., keep in mind that the only other GSM carrier in the U.S. is T-Mobile. And the scope of today’s Verizon announcement suggests that they’re betting on Android.

SDK changes. Apple moves at the rate of Apple. Keeping up with
their SDK changes is vital and waiting for Adobe (or anyone other
than you) to address these changes is not smart.

HIG-busting. I’ve read through the FAQ and it doesn’t look
like you get access to UIKit. So you can’t use any of Apple’s
excellent interface controls. So you get whatever convoluted mess
of a UI the developer wants to cobble together in Flash. I’ll
let you think about that for a moment.

The lack of UIKit access pretty much rules out anything other than games, I’d think. And judging by the games produced using Flash CS5 already in the store, I’m not sure it’s very good for that, either. I tried all the free ones, and have nothing good to say about any of them.

To put it another way, handset manufacturers have done more in the
last two years to improve Windows Mobile than Microsoft has, which
borders on pathetic. In the time since Windows Mobile 6.0 came out
in February of 2007, Apple has released the iPhone — three times.
Palm has created the Pre, with its totally new webOS. Android has
come into being, and grown into something wonderful. RIM has
created a touch phone and a revamped BlackBerry OS. For these
companies, the world has changed.

And Microsoft? They eked out some performance enhancements and a
new homescreen in 6.1, and executed a gaudy facelift for 6.5.
This is what they’ve done to Windows Mobile.

The release of Windows Mobile 6.5 has been mostly overlooked, lost amid all the other mobile news this week: the Verizon/Google Android deal, Palm’s major WebOS developer announcements, and Adobe’s Flash developer tools for iPhone OS.

Microsoft’s irrelevance in today’s mobile space is nothing short of a spectacular failure. Worse than the mere fact that Windows Mobile 6.5 is a total turd is that no one is surprised, and no one cares.

The only top-tier phones Verizon carries are BlackBerrys. That’s going to change:

Verizon Wireless and Google plan to co-develop several Android-based
devices that will be pre-loaded with innovative applications
from both parties as well as third-party developers. The family of
Android phones on the Verizon Wireless network will come from
leading handset manufacturers.

Smart move for both. Of the three new mobile platforms — iPhone, WebOS, and Android — Android is the first to land on Verizon. The bottom line is that this is Verizon’s way of announcing that they’ve pulled their head out of their ass regarding handsets.

That’s the cheeky slogan of a new Verizon ad reportedly set to
debut during tonight’s “Monday Night Football” game. Riffing
on the tagline from Apple’s iPhone commercials, it essentially
turns widespread complaints about the quality, coverage and speed
of AT&T’s network into a Verizon marketing campaign–if it
wasn’t that already. “Browse the Web and download music and
apps, at 3G speed, in five times more places than the nation’s
number two wireless carrier,” the ad suggests. “Before you
pick a phone, pick a network.”

This is a brilliant ad campaign from Verizon. The “there’s a map for that” slogan is cute, but the “Before you pick a phone, pick a network” slogan sounds like common sense and works directly to Verizon’s advantage. They’re selling their strength (the network) instead of spinning their weakness (their lineup of phones). The ad works because it’s true.

ClickToFlash has support for viewing videos from YouTube using the
QuickTime Player instead. We’ve heard a lot of feedback indicating
that users love this feature, and that they’d love it even more if
we expanded it to other video sites. […]

What do we need from you? We need help figuring out which video
sites we are actually able to support in ClickToFlash.

Monday, 5 October 2009

There doesn’t seem to have been any mention of it at Adobe’s MAX conference, but the best Flash-related technology in recent years continues to improve. ClickToFlash is an open source web content plugin for Mac OS X that blocks all Flash content on web pages by default. As the name implies, if you do want to load a Flash element, just click it. I give ClickToFlash my highest recommendation — everyone should install it.

The first is that they’re allowing developers to fully
distribute their apps via the web. What this means is that
developers can simply submit their apps to Palm, and Palm will
return to them a URL that they can then blog, tweet, do whatever
they want to share it. When a person then clicks on that URL they
can easily install the app. And while Palm is providing the URL,
it is not going to be reviewing the apps in any way — a clear
dig at Apple’s approval process.

This is a good opportunity for Palm. Perhaps being more open than Apple isn’t going to help them, but it certainly isn’t going to hurt.

Flash technology is nearly ubiquitous around the Web and it is
used by popular sites such as YouTube, Hulu, and MLB.com. But one
of the main criticisms of Flash on smartphones is that it is too
resource-intensive and can slow down a device or drain its
battery.

This is actually one of the main criticisms of Flash on Mac OS X, too. The other, of course, is that it’s crashy. Other than poor performance, memory consumption, and crashiness, though, Flash is well-regarded.

Adobe will be releasing a public developer beta for Windows
Mobile, Palm webOS, Windows, Macintosh, and Linux later this year.
The company also said public betas for Android, BlackBerry, and
Symbian mobile devices will hit in early 2010. Adobe expects
mobile devices to be released with full Flash support in the first
half of next year.

The only major smartphone platform missing from Adobe’s roadmap is
the iPhone.

When the real, physical offer letter and associated paperwork
arrived, I was highly amused to see that it has the same graceful
design, fit and finish that they devote to many of their
products. So I thought it deserved the same sort of review that
their other products might get.

We created a new compiler front end that allowed LLVM to
understand ActionScript 3 and used its existing ARM back end to
output native ARM assembly code. We call this Ahead of Time (AOT)
compilation—in contrast to the way Adobe Flash Player and Adobe
AIR function on the desktop using Just in Time (JIT) compilation.
Since we are able to compile ActionScript to ARM ahead of time,
the application gets all the performance benefits that the JIT
would offer and the license compliance of not requiring a runtime
in the final application.

Today at Adobe MAX, the company announced that Flash tools will
be able to build applications for iPhone that can be distributed
through Apple’s App Store. A beta version of Flash
Professional CS5 with this new capability is planned for release
later this year. These aren’t Flash SWF files, they’re
native iPhone apps.

This is not a port of the Flash runtime. You can’t use this to load Flash content over the web. What it means is that Flash developers can export native iPhone apps — compiled ARM binaries in .ipa packages — which can then be submitted to Apple through the normal App Store process. There are already seven such apps (built using beta versions of the new Flash developer tools) available in the App Store.

This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.

Apple has become the latest company to resign from the United
States Chamber of Commerce over climate policy.

“We strongly object to the chamber’s recent comments opposing
the E.P.A.’s effort to limit greenhouse gases,” wrote
Catherine A. Novelli, the vice president of worldwide government
affairs at Apple, in a letter dated today and addressed to Thomas
J. Donohue, president and chief executive of the chamber. Click
here to read the letter.

On Monday, Vonage, the Internet telephony company, is releasing a
mobile application for BlackBerrys, iPhones and iPod Touches. The
application, which is free, will allow users to place low-cost
international calls over Wi-Fi and cellular voice networks.

Wait a minute, I thought VOIP was only allowed over Wi-Fi for iPhone apps?

Update: Looks like it’s not VOIP over the cellular network. From MacRumors:

iPhone users calling international numbers via the Vonage Mobile
application on a cellular network are automatically connected to
Vonage’s network and utilize only domestic airtime minutes on
their carrier while paying Vonage’s international rates for the
calls from a prepaid, automatically refillable account.

While a recent survey by the consulting firm CFI Group found that
iPhone users are the most loyal smartphone users with 90 percent
saying they’d recommend the device to a friend, half of all iPhone
owners surveyed said they would like to jump ship to another
provider if given the chance.

So it makes sense to ask if it’s the iPhone hurting AT&T’s brand… how?

Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance survey the history and future of the tablet form factor. Some great stuff, including a rare on-the-record statement from a former Apple engineer who’d worked on prototypes back to 2003:

“It couldn’t be built. The battery life wasn’t long enough,
the graphics performance was not enough to do anything and the
components themselves cost more than $500,” said Joshua A.
Strickon, a former Apple engineer whose name is on several of the
company’s patents for multitouch technology.

And this gem:

Another former Apple executive who was there at the time said the
tablets kept getting shelved at Apple because Mr. Jobs, whose
incisive critiques are often memorable, asked, in essence, what
they were good for besides surfing the Web in the bathroom.

And on the other side of the pond, Jeff Dawson writes for the Sunday Times of London on Taschen’s imminent set of books on Kubrick’s unrealized Napoleon epic. Not sure why they put a question mark in the headline.

In the man’s own words:

“It has everything a good story should have. A towering hero,
powerful enemies, armed combat, a tragic love story, loyal and
treacherous friends, and plenty of bravery, cruelty and sex.”

On our side of the pond, Alice Rawsthorn writes for the Sunday New York Times fall design magazine on Arne Jacobsen’s timeless 1957 flatware, chosen by Stanley Kubrick for use by the astronauts in 2001. (Via Jim Coudal.)

Fantastic new $3 iPhone game. Super-simple, pixel-perfect, great music and sound. It’s an official port of this free Flash version. (I find the iPhone version, with a narrower aspect ratio and therefore less look-ahead, more challenging.)

Sunday, 4 October 2009

Clearly, other companies know how to sync painlessly with iTunes
music (see RIM’s Blackberry Media Sync for example), so why
doesn’t Palm develop a syncing solution for their own hardware?
The exact reason is unknown, but my guess is that it’s a
combination of things. Perhaps Palm doesn’t have the resources to
develop their own sync app. Or maybe they want some publicity. Or
maybe they just want to push Apple’s buttons. Who really knows.
But I seriously question the strategy and brains of any company
that ties critical product capabilities to the unsupported use of
their competitor’s software. I mean, really? Can it get any more
ridiculous? Can you possibly send a more mixed, less confidence-
inspiring, “we’re a bunch of hacks who can’t provide our own sync
software for our products” message to customers?

My updated if-I-were-a-betting-man wagers for upcoming Apple hardware announcements: all-new iMacs, all-new low-end (plastic) MacBook, new keyboard and mouse, speed-bump/price-cut Mac Mini update. Scratch that previous bet on Blu-ray in the iMacs, though — the old word on the street was that it was in; new word is that it’s out. Hope you like the iTunes Store if you like HD movies. Rumors that the new mouse has some sort of integrated touchpad dingus to replace the scroller ball are sounding good.

Saturday, 3 October 2009

Friday, 2 October 2009

My thanks to MailChimp for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. MailChimp is an email marketing service with great features, great design, and a great mascot. To top it off, they’ve also got great pricing: it’s totally free for up to 3,000 emails per month.

MailChimp helps you with design, with building your list of email addresses, and with tracking the performance of your messages. There’s even an API for integration with your existing systems. Sign up today and see why over 125,000 users choose MailChimp.

The good news: My friends at the Vanderbilt Republic Foundation are, at this writing, 96 percent of the way to their goal of raising $50,000 for their planned project to document the lives of Cambodia’s surviving master artists. They’re amazingly close.

The exciting news: There’s only one day left. Donate now and you might be the one to put them over the top.

Thursday, 1 October 2009

Overall, I found the HTC Hero to be the best Android phone I’ve
tested, and a worthy competitor to the iPhone, the BlackBerry and
the Pre.

Thank goodness they boogered up the front display with big “HTC” and “Sprint” logos. It retails for $280 but there’s a $100 mail-in rebate, and it only ships with 2 GB of built-in storage. That compares really poorly to the $99 no-rebate-necessary 8 GB iPhone.

Update: I should mention that Dave Nanian (of Shirt Pocket Software) has a Hero, brought it to C4 last weekend, and was kind enough to let me play with it for a few minutes. The Hero is clearly way better in every single way — way, way, way better — than last year’s G1. However, if I had to buy a non-iPhone today, I’d probably get a Pre, because the WebOS web browser is arguably as good as the iPhone’s, whereas Android’s is still behind, and Safari is by far my most-used iPhone app.

Good piece from Peter Hosey last week showing how UTIs are in no way a replacement for creator codes.

While I’m revisiting the topic, I should mention that I realize there are many people who are pleased by the change in Snow Leopard whereby Launch Services no longer looks at a file’s creator code when determining which app should open it, and that there are several completely reasonable arguments to be made in favor of said change. It’s a matter of preference, and I prefer otherwise. What is not reasonable are blathering arguments that UTIs are in any way a replacement for creator codes.